431–440 of 842 posts
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How is this a tiny detail. We live in a passivhaus. We hardly ever heat. Improving insulation of old houses is an important aspect here. Reducing energy consumption is as important as generating and storing energy.
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I wish you would expand and clarify the point you are trying to make. Currently it sounds like you are angry at a group of enthusiasts. I think for me and the OP it’s quite clear that optimizations can be made on production and consumption side. And in their circumstances financial reality says that increasing production is much cheaper, while possibly providing extra cash that would enable investment for reducing co…
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With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that you need better insulation. I know a person who has about 10kWp installed on a passivhaus here in latitude 59N and says that having a heat pump is overkill for them.
> better insulation better insulation is not cheap and therefore not everyone can afford to do it. Also the same people who want renewables are usually opposed to building new housing so there's that.
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No I don't, and I'll tell you why. The amount of energy hitting the surface of the earth is constant, assuming that the luminosity of the sun is constant. Photosynthesis as cyanobacteria/chloroplasts/chlorella perform it might be less efficient than a modern solar panel at converting the entirety of the spectrum to energy, but they did it and produced this fuel for hundreds of millions of years. Even if you get 10 ti…
I follow your logic but the sun is going to be hitting you for 70+ years. Your body surface area is probably equivalent to my 400W solar panel. That's a few KWh per day for 70+ years. How much oil will your decomposing body produce? How much energy will the vegetation in the Sahara desert produce?
The Sahara desert is a great idea, probably our best bet. And if we can source all the material needed to pave it with panels right from underneath it, all the better. But that's unlikely, and still, that's 2% of the earths surface. Not enough surface area to cover our energy needs, despite what anyone says. If we really have reached peak oil, that is, used half or more of the oil available to us, in 100 years, that took 75% of the earths surface a billion years to produce, paving the Sahara desert won't make a dent. Even using energy from the sun 100 times more efficiently, that's still 50 times less energy than we need, 2% of what's needed, and that doesn't take into account increasing energy needs worldwide.
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Piping ch4 would lead to release from all the inevitable pipe line leaks and limit the reduction in carbon emission.
I think it would reduce the reduction in carbon emission by some percentage, but since we're talking about direct air capture rather than point-source capture, it wouldn't limit the reduction in carbon emission.
The amount of solar panes we need was first impressed upon my by David Mackay's "Without Hot Air"[1]. I personally think solar is a useful tool for certain applications, but powering all of humanity with it feels like a step backwards paradigmatically. Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in human compatible photosynthesis. Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to harness fir…
I keep reading the same "nuclear is the future", but not only it is not improving its costs, it's getting worse. EDF is just broke, and the french citizens are going to pay for it.
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> With all due respect, looking at your numbers my hunch is that you need better insulation. With all due respect these are the kinds of "tiny" details that renewable enthusiasts conveniently forget. Yes, this person's house needs better insulation. As does everybody else's . You can't just wave this away with "your math is wrong". These numbers reflect reality, not wishful thinking.
How is this a tiny detail. We live in a passivhaus. We hardly ever heat. Improving insulation of old houses is an important aspect here. Reducing energy consumption is as important as generating and storing energy.
Only if the efficiency is 100%. In practice it's lower than that, so reducing consumption is better than increasing production.
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I wish you would expand and clarify the point you are trying to make. Currently it sounds like you are angry at a group of enthusiasts. I think for me and the OP it’s quite clear that optimizations can be made on production and consumption side. And in their circumstances financial reality says that increasing production is much cheaper, while possibly providing extra cash that would enable investment for reducing co…
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As a limiting case, a private system can't do it cheaper than a public one. A private system needs to skim profits off the top, which will always limit how cheap it can go
"Your margin is my opportunity." ~Jeff Bezos Private is cheaper if there is competition. Monopolies are always more costly, public or private.
While competition can indeed help illuminate new solutions, competition can also come in the form of different political parties and international comparisons.
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> The US alone effectively created that much money out of thin air during the pandemic. All of the countries combined printed far more. The difference being that most of that money ended up in rich people’s pockets, and are now causing a global economic crisis.
I am not sure of that. If all that money ended up in rich people's pocket, never to see the light of day again we won't be having the inflation crisis. The money through various investments is now out in the open, driving up inflation. It is still unequally distributed and that is causing issues. If there was a magical way to distribute that money equally between everyone inflation won't be an issue. Unfortunately ma…